Jafe Arnold is Special Editor of Fort Russ News and a Research Fellow of the Center for Syncretic Studies. Born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, Arnold has 5 years of experience in American pro-labor and pro-education community organizing, and has extensive knowledge of American sub-cultural movements.
Over the past few weeks, Washington has taken upon itself the mission to impose sanctions and other restrictive measures on “anyone who is anybody” in the current international environment. The US has imposed two new packages of sanctions on Russia over the trumped-up “Skripal conspiracy”, thus unleashing what Russia’s prime minister has called a “declaration of economic war.” At the same time, Trump has declared economic war on Turkey, raising tariffs which made the Turkish Lira fall in the ballpark of 20% overnight. Ankara has thus been driven closer to Iran, on whom Tru...
Donald Trump is a man of representations. On the one hand, he can be presented in the image of a businessman determined to set the economy on track, a stern leader who isn’t afraid to call fake news by its name and use Twitter as a weapon, a no-nonsense, consistent negotiator who can stand side by side with Putin and retain posture amidst the highest pressure, and a victor who can act as if he is moving from win to win even when he isn’t. Or Trump can be presented as a fumbling klutz incapable of forming complete sentences at press conferences, a disrespectful ignoramus...
The concept and phenomenon of “failed state” is — somewhat ironically — intimately bound to the United States. On the one hand, the term is ambiguous and politically subjective: qualitatively diverse cases ranging from Somalia to Russia are selectively called “failed states” whenever such fits the narrative of Washington’s foreign policy. A growing number of Western political scientists have accordingly come to admit that the “failed state” label is inherently about cui bono: it is often a pretext for destabilization, not a concern for stability. On the other hand, it is a...
A Rasmussen Report survey conducted between June 21 and 25 found that 31% of US voters believe it likely that the United States will experience a Second Civil War as early as within the next five years. The margin of sampling error was +/- 3% with a 95% level of confidence concerning data collected from 1000 respondents. That such a considerable portion of a massive, declining empire’s population is weary of the possibility of going to war with their neighbors is in itself highly worrying. Just as indicatively, the topic of a “New American Civil War” has now appeared in ma...
Out of approximately 1,600 public educational institutions in the United States, as of March 2018 only 35 have adopted the “Statement on Principles of Free Expression” from the University of Chicago, known as the “Chicago free speech commitment.” In other words, amidst heightening controversies over political expression on campuses, only a fraction of America’s educational sphere has expressed symbolic commitment to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution even as vaguely defended as it is in the Chicago statement. That the First Amendment right of free speec...
As the United States continues to decline, it is likely that the federal structure of America will be increasingly problematized. While the prospects of American separatisms are largely ignored or understated in the American info-sphere, it cannot be forgotten that a highly scientific poll from 2014 revealed that one in four Americans would support their state peacefully seceding from the federal United States of America. This figure is astounding in that it exposes just how unrepresentative the American political establishment and media are, and just how wide the void is...
Racial and ethnic discord has been a systemic problem in the theory and practice of American liberal democracy since the very beginning. While contemporary mainstream liberal discourse in American media and academia often paints this history as a progressive march from “less inclusive” to “more inclusive” now threatened by “Trump-era racism”, they simultaneously contradict this narrative in bemoaning the persistent de facto systemic disparities between old and new ethno-cultural groups in the US today, among whom they assign varying preferences of victimhood. Today, approx...
As discussed in our last article, one of the most significant spheres of crisis in the United States today is the education system, and this crisis is partially the result of a severe lack of funding and neglect on the part of policy-makers. When it comes to policy-formulation, the question always begs itself: Who is behind policy-making? More specifically, what are some of the most influential lobbies in American politics which have detracted from the education system? An extremely telling study from 2014 by political scientists Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page is revea...
One of the most problematic spheres in American society is the United States’ education system’s delicate suspension between stagnation and decline. According to a Pew Research Center study from February 2017, the United States’ academic record for the Programme for International Student Assessment remains only average in science, mathematics, and reading. In addition to this, not only has the United States’ public schooling system been ubiquitously assessed as in decline, but the affordability and value of a college education has also been doubted by an only increasing...